Warning: call_user_func_array() expects parameter 1 to be a valid callback, class 'AGPressGraph\manipulator' does not have a method 'httpsCanonicalURL' in /home/healin02/public_html/vivalamilpa.com/wp-includes/class-wp-hook.php on line 286

One day when we no loner have to fight,
When there is no Dow Chemical,
No Monsanto, Wall Street, and Exxon-Mobil,
When the hearth has excused them all
From the circle, and our governments
Have re-grown from the soft strata of our bodies
Like Oak trees from the midst of the Sierra Madre,
When the Earth has shaken our lousy adornments
Twisted from its very flesh, is naked again
And can at last breathe open our hearts
So together we might release a decades-long sigh
From the soil of generations before us,
We will have to remember to drop
The weapons from our roiling hearts,
We will have to remember to lift by hand
The plating from our backs,
The armor from our chests.
When we no longer have to sell lies
For a future of felled trees and fallen dreams,
When we no longer have to believe
In a bigger, richer, fatter, or any God,
When we once again feel the living
Ground from our breath, we will know
The temple of the moon has opened
In our bellies and we can begin
To grieve everything stuck to our bones
So the sun can rise again from the cold seas.
We will have to sell ourselves on giving,
We will have to grow used to green miles,
We will have to grow accustomed to ordinary,
To beauty here, no devil, and therefore
To heaven here—and every night now
In the quiet ease of our beds, we will have to remember
That we fought to not have to fight anymore.

An icon of the American dream
In truth is the vanguard of our demise.
Monoculture at all costs is the nursery
We plant around our homes and have seeded
In our hearts, stunting growth from the inside-out.
Once the low hedge of amnesia takes root
Somehow we forget the ancient rules
And so tend to the bed of our sacred surrounds
With mischief and an already modified trust.

Break out the herbicides and fungicides
To quell the weeds, the mycelium of regret,
Sorrow and shame, for what horror!
If we should meet some wilderness
Creeping into our crazy convention
From the jungle we have ignored inside.
What suicide to squat down like primitive people—
Whom we slander and slaughter still
Then lawlessly run off their lawnless lands—
To hand-pick the invaders that lack the look of Scott’s.
What hell would surface! if their wild sap
Were to lodge under our nails, on our pale skin!
Surely we’d succumb to illness lifetimes worse
Than what’s been written in the tabernacle
On the back of the Round-Up jug.

How ironic to define your “agricultural company”
“One Wooden Saint,”1 with your clergy of gangsters
Responsible for the devastation of biodiversity,
Including the residents of Nitro, West Virginia
And Anniston, Alabama whom you dosed with PCBs and dioxin,2
A legacy you try hard to escape though it clings to your name
Like dried feces dangling from the scruffy ass of a bad dog,
As you now desecrate our already burdened clean food supply
With your seeds of destruction, harassing, bankrupting, and ruining
Small farmers and seed co-ops with your divisive lawsuits,
Causing the pervasive poisoning of the American heartland
With your run-off blessings that flow into the veins
Of millions of Americans all the way to the “dead zone”
At the mouth of the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico
Where nothing grows for thousands of square miles
Thanks to you and your fake fertilizer friends in crime.

From the Gulf Stream waters to the Redwood forests
This land was spayed for you and me.
But kudos to you for sharing with us
The honesty of your petrified intent
Right there in your name, banking on
The fact that the majority of informed,
Aware, creative, wise, insightful,
Literate, progressive, brilliant Americans
Will altogether miss it.

Sorry Monsanto, I’m just not round-up ready
To have everything I love sacrificed
To your saintly sanitizations.
I eat my weeds to keep my gene pool
Bathed in the original nucleotide sequences
Ordered by sweet mama Earth.

When the grass has grown thick and lush
Drunk on the steroids from plastic bags and bottles
Made by the other messianic monopolies
That decimate our forests, turn our lakes into algae ponds,
Strip-mine our mountaintops and leave behind deserts
So that we can instead grow our personal patches
Of perfect green carpet, what do we do but wheel out the mower to spew exhaust, deafness
And the micro-molecule cocktails of horticultural chemotherapy
Into the air just in case any sane straggler, like a neighbor,
Had an epiphany, or an original thought, about to surface
From the muffled depths of their Goddess-entrusted
Largely scared and punished chunk of still wise earth
(Otherwise known as our bodies)
Just to keep our little patch of fake heaven pretty.

Strangely, we sometimes allow the largest invaders onto our turf.
But when they drop their withered ends onto our emerald rug,
We reach for another despicable human invention.
We blow and blow and blow all the death away
Because we believed those who make a living
Lying about the conspiracy of little branches and leaves,
Which in truth is the beauty of mulch and fragrant loam,
The celebration of moisture, rot and transformation
Whose cycles save us from the absence of insects
And their message for inner inspection.

We have made the carbon footprint
For a single blade of grass
The largest per capita polluter on the planet!

I think that when our children draw lawns
For their dream home on paper in school
It’s because something in them longs
For wide-open meadows and to lie down
On the wild, dirty, sane-making ground
Just as it is without the perverted fears
Some adults want sprayed on their playgrounds
And packed into their lunches.